You’d be hard pressed to find a guy with more going on than Mark Duplass. First and foremost, he’s the star of the wonderful and charming film Safety Not Guaranteed, which premiered at Sundance and opens June 8. In the film he plays Kenneth, a mysterious man who places an ad looking for a partner to help him travel back in time. The ad is answered by Aubrey Plaza (Parks and Recreation) and Jake Johnson (New Girl), skeptical journalists who, through Kenneth, discover their own truths.

But that’s so far from everything the actor/producer/writer/director has going on. He’s the star of the FX comedy The League, which has a new season about to start shooting. He was recently cast in Katherine Bigelow’s Osama Bin Laden film Zero Dark Thirty, he and his brother will soon release their 5th film, The Do-Deca Pentalathon on July 6 and he’ll also appear in Your Sister’s Sister, starring Emily Blunt, on June 15 and People Like Us, starring Chris Pine and Elizabeth Banks, on June 29.

Yeah, Mark Duplass is busy. But he took 20 minutes out of his day to talk to us about all of it. After the jump, we’ve got a two part video interview where we discuss all those projects as well as his thoughts on new forms of distribution, his Netflix Recommendation A Day on Twitter, mullets, Sundance and much more. Read More »

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If Sundance 2011 was the year of Brit Marling, Sundance 2012 was the year of Mark Duplass. Of course Marling was the new girl in town that year and Duplass had already been around the block, both as an actor and filmmaker, with movies like The Puffy Chair, Humpday and Baghead. Still, he came to Sundance in January with two movies that provided very different perspectives on his range. There wasSafety Not Guaranteed, which showed his wacky, paranoid, lovable side. And then there was Your Sister’s Sister, where a rugged exterior and sensitive interior lead the audience to believe two sisters, played by Emily Blunt and Rosemarie Dewitt, can fall for him in the midst of a tragedy. That would be a struggle for any actor but Duplass pulls it off (in both films really) and ultimately is the heart of a unique romantic comedy.

Directed by Lynn Shelton,Your Sister’s Sister will be released June 15. The film avoids the typical romantic comedy tropes, instead focusing on authentic characters and unpredictable reality framed in a classic love triangle. Check out the trailer for the film below. Read More »

While Sundance is best known for movies that sell for millions and stir up controversial topics, most of the movies are simple, well-written, well-acted films that are solid, but often get lost in the mix. Lynn Shelton‘s follow-up to Humpday, called Your Sister’s Sister, is one of those movies. Another is GOATS, the debut feature of Christopher Neil.

Your Sister’s Sister features Emily Blunt and Rosemarie DeWitt as estranged sisters Iris and Hannah who end up at their family’s old cabin when Iris’ best friend Jack (Mark Duplass) heads there to get over the one-year anniversary of the death of his brother. The three characters then develop what I’d like to call a “love triangle” but is more like a “love right angle” that flirts on and off with adding that third line.

GOATS stars David Duchovny, Vera Farmiga and Ty Burrell as the parental figures of a young teenager named Eliis, played by Graham Phillips. Ellis lives a care-free, hippie lifestyle in Arizona with his mom (Farmiga) and her groundskeeper named Goat Man (Duchovny) but when he decides to go back east to the prep school run by his estranged father (Burrell), he finds himself torn between two very different set of parental ideals.